Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not American history.
“in fourteen hundred and nightly three, Columbus stole all he could see.”
Someone recently said to me that America has the greatest propaganda system ever created. Then my mom said to me that the people protecting the Columbus statue at Marconi Plaza in south philly probably do not know all the horrible things he represents. That I am blessed to have an education and an interest that is more expansive. She said they don’t know what they are depending. So I decided to compile a list of the things that make Columbus basically one of the worst historical figures. He is known for two things. 1- stealing the land and the genocide of indigenous peoples. 2- starting the transatlantic slave trade. I have provided ample primary sources as evidence. I am not clear on where the confusion lies….willful ignorance? Thats as kind as I can go.
So one concern may be that its not right to judge historical figures based on todays standards. Columbus was a slaver and a pedophile. The founders were slavers and the Greeks were pedophiles but we revere them. The point is not that Columbus did these things, the point is the way he did them was barbaric and inhuman. The point is that Columbus was not just a slaver or pedophile but a war criminal who committed atrocities against indigenous peoples and stole their lands. But MY point is that the story of Columbus has an insidious message, the history we teach our children is full of lies created as a system of propaganda and myth building. The myth of Columbus teaches us to identify with the oppressor, to ignore the perspective of those the land was stolen from, and the rhetoric of discovery implies only the feats of the white man matters.
“Not understanding their past renders many Americans incapable of thinking effectively about our present and future”
“Students of the dominant social group are taught lies in the guise of fact creating an ‘inverted world’ view which hide the unjust distribution of power in the past so they do not have the tools to identify them in the future.”
Myth: Columbus was bold and brave, ahead of his time while his crew was fearful of sailing over the edge of the world. “The people of your earth believed the earth to be flat; Columbus proved it was round.“-star trek
Fact: In Columbus’s time all educated people and most sailors believed the earth was a sphere.
Proof: It looks round. It casts a circular shadow on moon. Sailors see its roundness when ships disappear over the horizon, hull first, then sails.
Proof: Washington Irving made up flat earth fable in 1828
Propaganda: The lie makes Columbus a man of science who corrected our faulty geography That those who direct social enterprises are more intelligent than those nearer the bottom.
2. Myth: Columbus on the first voyage with the pinta, Nina, and Santa Maria braved a dangerous journal and the crew almost mutinied.
Fact: It was smooth sailing and at worst rained only the last day when they knew they were close to land
Fact: there was no mutiny, at best some grumpy sailors
Fact: the journey was no more than a month and they stopped at the Canary Islands and were given aid.
Propaganda: Columbus bravely succeeded in an arduous journey even while dealing with superstitious sailors.
3. Myth: Columbus was a skilled navigator and leader who hid the distance of his journey from the crew so they would not think they had gone too far from home.
Fact: Columbus had false entries in the log of Santa Maria to keep the route to the Indies secret. Columbus was a less experienced navigator than the Pinzon brothers who captained the Nina and Pinta
Proof: Columbus admits this later in his journal
Proof: argument from Salvador de Madariaga that we would have to think the others on the voyage were fools. Columbus had no special method available only to him whereby distances sailed could be more accurately reckoned than by the other pilots and masters
Propaganda: Those at the top are smarter than those at the bottom. Columbus was a genius navigator.
4. Myth: Columbus died alone and poor without recognition for his deeds
Fact: Columbus died well off.
Proof: He left his airs well endowed with the title: ‘Admiral of the Ocean Sea’ now carried by his 18th generation descendant
Propaganda: Columbus’s story is a tragedy of a brave man wrongly treated by the world
5. Myth: Columbus did not know he had reached a ‘new’ continent
Proof: His journal entries
Propaganda: to humanize Columbus and maximize his greatness
6. Myth: Columbus discovered a ‘New World’
Fact: It was new only to Europeans
Proof: People had lived in Americas for thousands of years
Propaganda: the white European conquest was right and natural. Implies we have a right to this land and subtly says it was empty of anyone who mattered
Propaganda: justifies American exceptionalism and natural right to the world. In 1989 President George H.W. Bush invoked Columbus as a role model for the nation: “Christopher Columbus not only opened the door to a New World, but also set an example for us all by showing what monumental feats can be accomplished through perseverance and faith.”
7. Myth: Columbus ‘discovered’ America
Fact: Columbus not the first to discover America but the last
Fact: the rhetoric of discovery has been used to justify the stolen land
Proof: How can one person discover what another already knows and owns?
Propaganda: All the important discoveries are traceable to white Europe
Propaganda Analysis: “So long as our textbooks hide from us the roles that people of color have played in exploration, from at least 6000 BC to the twentieth century, they encourage us to look to Europe and its extensions as the seat of all knowledge and intelligence. So long as they say ‘discover’ they imply that whites are the only people who really matter.” -Lies My Teacher Told Me page 66
Use of Propaganda: words matter: In 1823 Chief Justice John Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court decried that Cherokees had certain rights to their land in Georgia by dint of their ‘occupancy’ but that whites had superior rights owing to their ‘discovery’. How American Indians managed to occupy Georgia without having previously discovered it Marshall neglected to explain.
8. Myth: Columbus was the first to voyage to the Americas across Atlantic.
Fact: The Norse, The Phoenicians and Africans sailed to America long before Columbus.
Fact: Columbus was not the first, just the first white catholic to make it
Fact: Phoenicians beat Columbus by over 2000 years
Fact: at best students are taught the Norse came a little earlier but they failed where we succeeded. No mention is made of the vast amounts of evidence that show other peoples traveling across the ocean
Proof: There were people already there and all humans originated from same place, so the indigenous peoples had to have traveled somehow
Proof: the huge face stones in Mexico have distinctly African features
Proof: archeological discoveries of tools and art
Propaganda: Only the feats of white people matter. All important developments can be traced to white Europeans
Propaganda: students learn that black feats are not considered important while white ones are.
9. Myth: Native Americans walked across the Atlantic in an Ice Age
Fact: Native Americans came to the Americas between 70,000 and 12,000 BC, from Siberia to Alaska
Proof: It is impossible to walk across the ocean even in an Ice Age
Propaganda: the natives people were primitive and European whites were smarter and more advanced
10. Myth: Columbus came for exploration and trade
Fact: Columbus’s purpose from the beginning was conquest and exploitation for which he used religion as a rationale to force the indigenous peoples to work for him
Proof: the Spanish sought gold, they killed Indians, and Indians fled and resisted.
Propaganda: Columbus’s venture had good intentions and his efforts were religiously motivated
11. Possible Myth: Columbus was a Catholic Italian
Fact: this is an unproven story
Fact: some scholars believe he was a jewish convert from Spain hiding from the inquisition.
Proof: He wrote in his journals in Spanish and could not write in Italian
Propaganda: Italian American Nationalism
12. Probable Myth: Columbus yelled ‘Tierra!’ Or ‘land’ when he spotted the coast and his first act on ground was to thank god
Fact: There is absolutely no proof this is the case
Proof: Considering all the other embellishments to the myth of Columbus it seems reasonable to think this is a lie as well.
Propaganda: focus white American identify with Columbus and the moment of ‘discovery’ not what Columbus did to the native peoples and lands he ‘discovered’
13. Myth: White Europeans invented navigation and sea fairing ships
Fact: Not true. White history says the design started with Henrey the Navigator of Portugal between 1415 and 1460.
Fact: Egyptians and Phoenicians where sailing long before white Europeans. Portugal probably saw their designs and that is where Columbus got his ‘new ship’.
Fact: There was nothing special about Columbus’s navigation abilities
Proof: massive amounts of archaeological data, including coins from ancient Rome.
Proof: If everyone originated in same place, then how did any people get there before Columbus?
Propaganda: all important discoveries came from white europeans and the natives where primitive and fortunate to be ‘civilized’
14. Myth: White Europeans conquered because they are/were naturally the stronger smarty people
Fact: History tells us it was one man but it was actually many cultures
Fact: White Europeans learned medicine and without the help of the native peoples would have starved for lack on knowledge of local agriculture
Fact: Democracy came from Indigenous Peoples
Fact: ‘Syncretism’ is combining the ideas from two or more cultures to something new.
Proof: Muslims preserved the wisdom of the greeks and enhanced it with ideas from china, india, and africa, then passing it on to Europe via Italy and spain
Propaganda: only white Europeans are strong and a multiracial society is not rational. Clearly, all advancement and progress has come from the white man.
Propaganda: European world domination is natural and inevitable
Propaganda: all culture and modern Tecnology comes from white europeans
15. Origin Myth: He was good and so are we.
Fact: Some people cannot accept Columbus as a villain. “But an honest account of history does not mean Columbus was bad and so are we. Textbooks should show that right morality or immorality cannot simply be conferred upon us by history. Merely being part of the United States, without regard to our own acts and ideas, does not make us immoral or moral human beings. History is more complicated than that.”
Truth of the Legacy of Christopher Columbus:
Columbus changed the world and revolutionized race relations.
His Legacy: the class of cultures and system of domination that still exist today
A bloody atrocity that left a legacy of genoicide and slavery that endures to some degree to this day.
Christopher Columbus changed the world in two ways: Colonization in the form of genoicide and Slavery
The taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous people in Western Hemisphere, leading to their near extermination.
Sunday October 14th 1492: “I could conquer the whole of them with fifty men, and govern them as I pleased.”
Columbus returned with Haitian Slaves and Ferdinand and Isabella outfitted Columbus for a second voyage with 17 ships, 1200-1500 men, cannons, crossbows, guns, cavalry, and attack dogs.
The War of the Worlds allegory
When the ‘primitive’ peoples were terrified by the advance Tecnology of the aliens Wells wanted us to sympathize with the natives on Haiti in 1943 or on Australia in 1788 or in the upper Amazon jungle today
Conquer them he did. Columbus and his men demanded food, gold, spun cotton, women, ect.
Columbus used punishment by example to ensure cooperation
When an Indian committed even a minor offense, the Spanish cut off his ears or nose. Disfigured, the person was sent back to his village as living evidence of the brutality the Spanish were capable of
At first the resistance was passive but eventually they took up arms, their resistance gave Columbus an excuse to make war
Ferdinand Columbus’s biography of his father: “The soldiers mowed down dozens with point-blank volleys, loosed dogs to rip open limbs and bellies, chased fleeing Indians into the bush to skewer them on sword and pike and with God’s aid soon gained a complete victory, killing many Indians and capturing others who were also killed.”
Columbus’s created a tribute system where natives received a medallion after paying tribute and were safe for three months where they would have to provide another tribute or have their hands chopped off.
The encomienda system came later but was of Columbus’s design
Pedro de Cordoba wrote a letter to King Ferdinand in 1517 describing the Haiti that Christopher Columbus had created, "As a result of the sufferings and hard labor they endured, the Indians choose and have chosen suicide. Occasionally a hundred have committed mass suicide. The women, exhausted by labor, have shunned conception and childbirth . . . Many, when pregnant, have taken something to abort and have aborted. Others after delivery have killed their children with their own hands, so as not to leave them in such oppressive slavery.” -Lies My Teacher Told Me pg 57
The Haitians impaled themselves, drank poison, jumped off cliffs, hanged themselves and killed their children
Estimates as high as 8 million.
1496 estimates of 3 million
1542 estimates of 200 full blooded Haitian Indians
The methods unleashed by Columbus are the larger part of his legacy. Other Nations rushed to emulate Columbus. “In 1501 the Portuguese began to depopulate Labrador, transporting the now extinct Beothuk Indians to Europe and Capa Verde as Slaves. After the English established beachheads on the Atlantic coast of North America, they encouraged capture and sell members of more distant tribes. Charleston South Carolina, became a major port of exporting American Indian Slaves. Pilgrims and Puritans sold the survivors of the Pequot War into Slavery in Bermuda in 1673. The French sipped virtually the entire Natchez nation in chains to the West Indies in 1731.”
2. The transatlantic slave trade which created a racial underclass
Columbus sent the first slaves across the Atlantic
Columbus sent more slaves across Atlantic than any other individual (5,000)
On Haiti Columbus did not find gold at first so he found another source of wealth
Columbus in letter to Ferdinand and Isabella in 1496 on Indian death rate: “Although they die now, they will not always die The negroes and Canary Islanders died at first.”
“there now began a rain of terror in Hispaniola”- Hans Koning
On The sexual slave trade
Columbus rewarded his lieutenants with native women to rape. They raided villages for sex and sport
Columbus wrote to friend in 1500 “A hundred castellanoes are as easily obtained for a women as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from 9 to 10 are now in demand”
To replace dying Haitians, the Spanish imported tens of thousands more Indians from the Bahamas, to extinction
Because the Indians died, Columbus imported slaves from Africa. Beginning the massive slave trade the other way across the Atlantic, from Africa
Site of first large scale revolt, when blacks and American Indians banded together in 1519. The uprising lasted more than a decade and brought to end by Spanish in 1530s
In 1791-1804 Haitians Revolted in the first successful slave rebellion in the West
Who are our US History Textbooks written for?
Who are ‘we’? Columbus is no hero in Mexico even though Mexico is must more Spannish and might be expected to take pride in this hero of Spanish history. Why not? Because Mexico is much more Indian than US, and because Mexicans perceive Columbus as white and European.
‘the fundamental epistemic asymmetry between typical white views of blacks and typical black views of whites: these are not cognizers linked by a reciprocal ignorance but rather groups whose respective privilege and subordination tend to produce self-deception, bad faith, evasion, and misrepresentation on the one hand, and more veridical perceptions, on the other hand’
Continuing to use terms like ‘discovered’ and ‘civilized’ allow whites to think of selves as master to the native (even though colonization is over) and superior morally and intellectually.
“When history textbooks leave out the Arawaks, they offend Native Americans. When they omit the possibility of African and Phoenician precursors to Columbus, they offend African Americans. When they glamorize explores such as de Soto just because they were white, our histories offend all people of color. When they leave out Las Casas, they omit an interesting idealist with whom we all might identify. When they glorify Columbus, our textbooks prod us toward identifying with the oppressor. When textbook authors omit the causes and process of European world domination, they offer a history whose purpose must be to keep us unaware of the important questions.” -page 69, Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen
